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Of Hume and Bondage

By Simon Blackburn December 11, 2011 5:30 pmDecember 11, 2011 5:30 pm

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

Anyone admiring David Hume as I do finds much to cheer, but much to lament in the state of academic philosophy, as this year, the 300th anniversary of his birth, comes to a close. Hume was an anatomist of the mind, charting the ways we think and feel — a psychologist or cognitive scientist before his time. The cheering feature of the contemporary scene is that plenty of people are following in those footsteps. The nature versus nurture battle has declared an uneasy draw, but the human nature industry is in fine fettle, fed by many disciplines and eagerly consumed by the public.

Hume crafts a straightforward and entirely plausible account of what it is for things to matter to us as they do.

Yet among philosophers it is not uncommon to find Hume patronized as a slightly dim, inaccurate or naïve analytical philosopher who gamely tried to elucidate the meanings of terms but generally failed hopelessly to do so. In fact, Immanuel Kant, a German near-contemporary of Hume, who is often billed as his opponent, had cause to defend him against a similar complaint more than two centuries ago. “ One cannot without feeling a certain pain,” Kant wrote in 1783, “behold how utterly and completely his opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie and finally Priestley missed the point of his problem and constantly misjudged his hints for improvement — constantly taking for granted just what he doubted, and conversely, proving with vehemence and, more often than not, with great insolence exactly what it had never entered his mind to doubt.” Plus ça change.

The most visible example of this is the rumpus surrounding the famous passage in which Hume declares that reason by itself is inert, and has no other office than to serve and obey the passions. The mountains of commentary this has excited include accusations that Hume is a skeptic about practical reasoning (whatever that might mean); that he is a nihilist who cannot have any values; that in his eyes nothing matters; that he is too stupid to realize that learning that a glass contains benzene instead of gin might extinguish your desire to drink from it; that he constantly forgets his own theory; and indeed, in the words of one contemporary writer — the frothing and foaming and insolence here reach a crescendo — that philosophers like Hume only avoid being “radically defective specimens of humanity” by constantly forgetting and then contradicting their own views. It is melancholy to see one’s colleagues going so far astray for it is surely sensible enough to say that practical reasoning works by mobilizing considerations that engage our desires and wishes, passions and concerns. Those facts that do not concern us indeed remain inert; but far from implying that nothing matters Hume crafts a straightforward and entirely plausible account of what it is for things to matter to us as they do.

So why the panic? Plato taught philosophers to regard themselves as the special guardians of reason: mandarins whose cozy acquaintance with the forms, or with logic, or with rationality entitles them to special authority in the deliberations of mankind. Take away the role and you destroy a whole professorial raison d’être. And reasons have become the Holy Grail of contemporary philosophy. They beam down at us, or at least beam down at the illuminati among us. They are the highest court of appeal, what William James called the giver of “moral holidays,” inescapable, inexorable and independent of us, free from the trail of the human serpent. Worldly pains are one thing, but the pain of irrationality — well, even the threat of that is a fearful thing, a Medusa or gorgon’s head to turn your opponents to stone.

Leif Parsons

I think there is something in the water that makes this self-image so seductive at present — a cultural need prompting philosophers to separate themselves as far as possible from the unwashed skeptics, nihilists, relativists or ironists of postmodernism, of which the best known American spokesman was the late Richard Rorty. These are the people who have infiltrated many humanities departments for a generation and who, curiously enough given their usual political colors anticipated today’s politicians in being unable to talk of facts or data — let alone reasons — without sneering quote marks. To be fair, however, while the postmodernists used the quotes because they obsessed over the idea that reality is capable of many different interpretations, the politicians and pundits tend to use them because they cannot bear the thought that reality might get in the way of their god-given right to simple certainties, simple visions and simple nostrums. It’s a different motivation, and Fox News may be relieved to hear that it is not really the heir of Jacques Derrida.

Perhaps the cultural situation of the West is sufficiently insecure, like that of Athens after the war with Sparta, for us to need the same defenses against the skeptical quote marks that were provided by Socrates and Plato.They taught us that we can respond to an eternal independent beacon, the heavenly structures of reason itself. The idea that down in our foundations there lie grubby creatures like desires, or passions, or needs, or culture, is like some nightmarish madwoman in the attic, and induces the same kind of reaction that met Darwin when he too drew attention to our proximity to animals rather than to angels. Surely we, the creatures of reason, are not in bondage to the horrible contingencies that go with being an animal? From their professorial eyries the mandarins fight back, reassuring each other that the Holy Grail is there to be seen, spilling into tomes and journals and conferences, e-mails, blogs and tweets, the torrents of what Wittgenstein nicely called the “slightly hysterical style of university talk.”

So does Hume actually give comfort to the postmodernists? Are Foucault and Derrida his true heirs? Certainly not, although he is well seen as a pragmatist: an ancestor of James, Dewey, Wittgenstein or even the less apocalyptic parts of Nietzsche or Richard Rorty. But it never occurred to Hume to doubt that there are standards of both reasoning and conduct. He has no inhibitions about condemning aspects of our minds that he regards as useless or pernicious: gullibility, enthusiasm, stupidity, and the “whole train of monkish virtues.” And in doing so he thinks he can stand foursquare with uncorrupted human nature, the party of mankind. This is where the authority of our moral standards rests, and the base is firm enough. Nor is it anything esoteric or surprising, since we all know when life is going well or badly, and when we hear the words people use about us, we all know whether they express admiration or aversion, praise or blame.

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The pragmatist slogan that “meaning is use” directs us to look at the actual functioning of language. We then come at the nature of our thinking by understanding the ways we express ourselves. Meaning is important, as analytical philosophy always held. But it is a house with many mansions. It is not monolithically and myopically concerned with recording the passing show, as if all we can do is make public whichever aspect of reality has just beamed upon us. We are agents in our world, constantly doing things — so much so that perception, like reason, is itself an adaptation whose function is not to pick out the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, but only to foreground what is salient in the service of our goals and needs. Meaning, therefore, needs to look two ways: back to the environment within which our mental lives are situated, but also forward to the changes in that environment that our desires and goals determine. Fortunately these ideas have percolated widely into areas outside philosophy: it is widely understood, for instance, that animal signals are more like injunctions telling other animals what to do, than simple registrations of elements in the environment.

Hume was able to use his pragmatism and his pluralism about the many functions of the mind to avoid metaphysics. About that he was famously a pyromaniac, advocating that we commit to the flames most of what has passed as philosophy from Parmenides to Berkeley. But people need philosophy: we need defenses against the corrosive drips of skepticism. This need surely motivates the apostles of reason to persevere at metaphysics, exploring the world of being and becoming, delineating the true and ultimate nature of reality, finding what is truly there behind the superficial appearances of things. And combined with this image of what we should be doing there comes the inability to read or appreciate anyone who is doing something entirely different. So the stark, $64,000 question in much contemporary interpretation of Hume is whether he was a “realist” or not about values and causes, or even persons and ordinary things — questions that should actually be nowhere on the agenda, since it imports precisely the way of looking at things that Hume commits to the flames.

Hume’s road is subtle, and too few philosophers dare take it. Yet the whirligig of time may bring in its revenges, as a new generation of pragmatists look at much contemporary writing with the same horror as Hume directed at Spinoza, Nietzsche at Kant, or Russell at Hegel. Meanwhile one soldiers on, hoping, as Hume himself did, for the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition.

Simon Blackburn retired this year from the Bertrand Russell Chair of philosophy at the University of Cambridge. He is a Distinguished Research Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and taught for 20 years at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is the author of many books, including “Think,” Ruling Passions,” “Lust,” and “Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed.”

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The Stone features the writing of contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. The series moderator is Simon Critchley. He teaches philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. To contact the editors of The Stone, send an e-mail to opinionator@nytimes.com. Please include “The Stone” in the subject field.